To test this code with testthat we create another file for tests. The name of the file should begin with test so that testthat can recognize it as a file of test code. So let name the file containing the code above real_roots.R and the file containing its tests test_real_roots.R.

The test file needs to read in the file being tested.

source("real_roots.R")

Now let’s write some tests for the case of a quadratic with two real roots.

This tests that we get back two numbers and that they are sorted in increasing order.

Next we find the roots of (x + 3000)2 = x2 + 6000x + 9000000. We’ll test whether we get back -3000 as the only root. In general you can’t expect to get an exact answer, though in this case we do since the root is an integer. But we’ll show in the next example how to test for equality with a given tolerance.

To show how to test code that should raise an error, we’ll find the roots of 2x + 3, which isn’t a quadratic. Notice that you can test whether any error is raised or you can test whether the error message matches a given regular expression.

To run the tests, you can run test_dir or test_file. If you are at the R command line and your working directory is the directory containing the two files above, you could run the tests with test_dir("."). In this case we have only one file of test code, but if we had more test files test_dir would find them, provided the file names begin with test.